I am neutral on most things that don’t involve food or sex or sexfood, which does not yet exist but which I already feel strongly about. But I am against Net neutrality. That’s the idea being pushed by the President, the FCC and people who write comments on blogs and want everything to be free except what they happen to do for a living. Net neutrality would set up rules to make sure your Internet provider treats all information equally; no website would be able to pay to move more quickly. This sounds good because people like the fact that the Internet has no barriers to entry. But that’s the worst thing about the Internet. It’s why looking for information about Net neutrality requires clicking around for three hours, since each site is written by some dude who knows as little as you do. I like that everything is allowed to be on the Internet, which is like a planet-size bookstore with, for some reason, a continent-size section for pets doing stupid things. But I like that at a real bookstore, I can instantly tell the difference between works by actual historians and works by conspiracy theorists, since the real books are printed on good paper with pretty covers and the others are smudgy pamphlets. We need to bring those barriers of entry to the Internet, and speed is a key way to do it. Senator Al Franken, at the Netroots Nation conference in late July, talked about a dystopian future without Net neutrality: “How long do you think it will take before the Fox News website loads five times faster than Daily Kos?” Hopefully, this will happen right away. Fox News should load 20 times faster than Daily Kos, because far more people read it. It’s better for society that millions of people get someplace a little faster while the relatively few Daily Kos readers wait a few seconds. This is why not all roads are the same width. And more people go to the Fox News site because it’s got tons of people reporting, balancing and fairing, whereas two of the contributing editors at Daily Kos are named DarkSyde and Angry Mouse. Bandwidth is an increasingly limited resource, and we’ve got to figure out a better way to allocate it. You’re grateful that your cell-phone carrier nonneutrally allows 911 calls through first, phone calls second
